Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Our species’ ability to understand and respond to the planetary ecological crisis may be aided by a truly ecological media ecology, that is, by the idea that there is not just an analogical resonance between natural ecologies and media ecologies but a cosmological community. Whitehead’s panexperientialist cosmology allows us to generalize media ecology’s focus on…
“The ideology of modern capitalism is an expression of the deficient mental structure’s repression of the time element, of creative becoming. Instead of recognizing the importance of the dialectic of history and the ongoing and entangled processes of natural and social transformation, capitalist economic theory insists that the present arrangement represents the “end of history”…
”Whitehead wanted to give some explanation for how it is that in a world of process we nonetheless are able to recognize and identify definite characters or entities. We are out at sea and glimpse a whale just before it dives under the surface. A moment later, it explodes into the air. “There it is…
“If the nature of reality is processual and relational, then a diplomatic approach to truth is the only adequate way to respond to it. With every encounter with other psyches, we make the truth anew. Reality doesn’t just sit there waiting for the most clear-headed intellect to uncover. Reality is participatory and co-created, not just…
“…this planet, or this nebula in which our sun is placed, may be gradually advancing towards a change in the general character of its spatial relations. Perhaps in the dim future humankind, if it then exists, will look back to the queer, contracted three-dimensional universe from which the nobler, wider existence has emerged.” –Whitehead, Modes…
Meaning runs far deeper than designation. We will never be able to think our connection to reality if we think of reality as a collection of things, because meaningful experience is about more than things. Experience is constituted by events. The ontology of an event cannot be captured by the mental representation of material things…
“It is evident that the more complex organisms have not evolved simply by adapting themselves to the environment. Instead, according to Whitehead, “the upward trend has been accompanied by a growth of the converse relation. Animals have progressively undertaken the task of adapting the environment to themselves.”[9] The primary evolutionary function of Reason is thus…
“I agree there are differences between race and gender. The differences have to do precisely with the unique forms of oppression that have been constellated in relation to each historically. I’m less convinced by attempts to draw lines separating “culture” from “nature.” It’s misleading to simply say that gender is learned (and so contingent) and…
“There is nothing “outside” the natural order. In this sense, I am opposed to the transcendentalist’s move to remove Reason or the reflective understanding from physical reality. There is indeed a supernaturalist residue in much transcendental and phenomenological philosophy. This is why my project has always been to theorize “the natural order” as itself always…